There are albums out there that make you doubt the veracity of your sonic equipment. You always feel as if you’re missing something, as if there’s something more on the edge of the music you’re hearing. Is it your ears or your earphones that are robbing you of that edge? Or is it simply that the album in question seems to endlessly unfold, holding more and more as you listen? Whichever the case, Kayo Dot has always been able to produce albums that invoke this sensation. From their immense debut works, through all the countless changes they have undertaken, one constant has remained true, an inescapable sense of impossible lushness. Their music encompasses all but leaves plenty of the imagination, a pocked soundscape for your mind to fill in.

Plastic House on Base of Sky is no different. Fueled by Toby Driver’s penchant for the sounds of Susumu Hirasawa, the album is a lush, thousand-times folded sojourn in a neo-futuristic hive city. Whether from the aesthetics of Paprika or the decisively forward-thinking science fiction of Frank Herbert (think of Jodorowsky’s foiled renditions rather than Lynch’s), Kayo Dot have drawn forward a convulsing, neon tinged maze of experimental rock/pop.

This Friday, June 24th, the almost aggressively eclectic and indefinable Kayo Dot will release their latest album, Plastic House On Base Of Sky. About one month ago, on May 28th, the band performed at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, playing a selection of material from Plastic House and their previous two albums, Coffins On Io and Hubardo. Against the backdrop of an unseasonably warm and unbearably humid day, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kayo Dot composer, multi-instrumentalist, and mastermind Toby Driver to discuss a range of topics surrounding the album, its influences, its challenges, and why metal isn’t a primary source of musical inspiration for him these days.